Sapphire Radeon R7 260X OC 2GB Graphics Card Review

Posted on February 17, 2014 8:00 AM by Techgage Staff

Both AMD and NVIDIA are in the midst of launching new budget GPUs, but neither of them affect the position of the Radeon R7 260X – a great thing as I have Sapphire’s take on the model to tackle. With a boost of 50MHz to the core clock, and an improved cooler, should Sapphire’s R7 260X OC be on your sub-$150 shortlist?

In December, I took AMD’s $99 Radeon R7 260 for a spin. Overall, I was left impressed with the 1080p gaming it could deliver, and even went as far as calling it a “console-killer”. Little did I realize at the time, though, AMD wasn’t targeting that particular card at the North American market. In fact, it hasn’t been available on these shores at all since its launch, as far as I can tell. Gee, thanks AMD.

Given the lack of the R7 260 in North America, the cheapest model in AMD’s latest Radeon series is the R7 260X. Or, at least it was up until last week. You see, Sapphire sent me its take on the 260X about a month ago, and while I hoped to get the review up a couple of weeks ago, it couldn’t happen. So of course, AMD decided to release not one, but two new budget Radeons since then. Fortunately for me though, neither of those models affects this one; instead, it just makes the purchasing decision at that price-point a little more interesting.